Thursday, 20 March 2014

Hotel of Dreams

About seven years ago I started
working at a university in another town to the one I lived in, which meant that
I either had to find some sort of permanent digs there or else stay in bed-and-breakfasts
and cheap hotels. I chose the latter. The hotels and b&bs, as you might
expect, turned out to be of varied character: one b&b room had the main
light switch for the room located outside in the corridor. I decided that to
make all this more bearable I should try and turn it into a project of some
sort.

In Tom Waits’ song ‘9th
and Hennepin’ from Rain Dogs the
singer offers a description of a down-at-heal part of town seen and imagined
from a passing train. He is clearly looking at a cheap hotel when he sings: ‘And the rooms all smell like diesel,
and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here’. It is a scary
thought that when sleeping in a hotel your dream-life could be invaded by the
dream-world of another, or that the dreams of others might seep under the
doors, through the walls and congregate in your pillow. But, I wondered, would
it be too far-fetched to imagine that the room itself was some sort of
repository of dreams, or that it was an agent in dreaming, shaping and
populating your dreams?

The idea might not mean straying that far from classical
Freudianism. After all it was Freud who taught us that the content of dreams
couldn’t be translated willy-nilly into a symbolic vocabulary of dreaming. It
was Freud that came up with the formula that dreams were poetic utterances that
used the flotsam and jetsam of our ordinary life and arranged it according to a
grammar of memory and desire. Perhaps quite rightly those interested in
psychoanalysis have concentrated on the memory and desire part of this rather
than what Freud calls the ‘day’s residue’, but it could be that it is the day’s
residue that should be given more attention. Where better to find these
residues than in the immediate environs of such uncanny worlds of cheap hotels?

My project (which I must admit I
have pursued fairly diffidently) consists of taking a photograph of the hotel
room and the view from the window of the room, a photograph after I have slept
in the bed, and accompanied this with an account of the dream that occurred in
this ‘dream site’. I was hoping to avoid the strange disconnect and boredom that
occurs when you hear another’s dream, because I would be offering a material
context and suggesting that perhaps the dream belonged as much to the room as
it belonged to me. The idea would be that at some point I would make a ‘coffee
table’ type book called Dream Hotels and
that while it might encourage the reader to think that they would be
encountering sumptuous swanky hotels they would in fact find more
run-of-the-mill hotels, as well as actual rather than idealised dreams. Anyway
here is a dream from this project and above and below is the room it occurred in:

We might be in Eastern Europe during
the Cold War. We are in a thick forest. There is a man with a beard and a hat
sitting in a dark old-fashioned car (it could be a Humber). On the passenger
seat is a very large bushel of twigs. There is a complicated heist in process
that involves a lot of double crossing. The man in the car has a canny plan
that will mean that he secures the heist and leaves everyone else empty handed.
I am the man but I have forgotten the plan.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hello

I teach cultural studies at the University of Sussex in England. I have written a few academic books - most recently A Passion for Cultural Studies and Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. My first non-academic book was published with Profile. It came out in January 2014 and is called The Great Indoors: At Home in the Modern British House.